Nature 282, 707 - 709 (13 December 1979); doi:10.1038/282707a0

Cenozoic sedimentation in the central North Pacific

Bruce H. Corliss & Charles D. Hollister

Woods Hole Oceanographie Institution, Woods Hole, Massachusetts 02543

The central North Pacific, one of the largest sedimentary provinces in the world ocean, is covered by red clays and abundant manganese nodules^1,2. Few studies have focused on the sedimentation history in this area, presumably because of the difficulty of dating these sediments; biostratigraphically useful fossils are rare or absent, and palaeomagnetic stratigraphy is limited in this area to the past 2−3 Myr (refs 3−5 and R. A. Prince et al., in preparation). We present here a history of Cenozoic sedimentation for the central North Pacific based on lithologie, stratigraphie and sedimentological data from a single 25-m long giant piston core (B.H.C. and C.D.H. in preparation). A sedimentation model incorporating the present-day sedimentation patterns in the central North Pacific and the north-northwest movement of the Pacific plate during the Cenozoic seems to explain the observed sedimentological variations seen in this unique core.

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